How many movies are most people going to download at one time? You may get 4-5 movies when you go to Blockbuster but do you go out and buy 4-5 of them at a time? There will probably be a huge spike when it opens up then it will level off and finally start to grow as more and more people get the compatible hardware and software to view the movies on a TV.

having to burn these to DVDs would be even more time consuming, not to mention a DRM nightmare. i am really curious to see what they have, ahem, in store for all of us.

Assuming that one will be allowed to burn them to disk, something not now allowed on iTunes video downloards, a bit of effort isn't a bad thing. It isn't as though you have to be there monitoring the process.

Maybe this is where Google comes in - the use of Google servers for movie distribution all over the US (and the world, assuming this is open to beyond the US. And it just might be since it's supposedly being simulcast to the UK and the Mac Expo.)

That might be why it was so important to get Dr. Schmidt on the Apple Board first.

By the way, the Board thing also confirms that Apple won't be going into advertising on its own, as suggested by those who thought Apple should buy YouTube. If it does anything along those lines, it will partner with Google.

Optional and separate movie "rental" service for $14.99/month. Features some fancy pants dynamic DRM which allows 3 movies available for download at a time. When you're done watching you delete it and it frees up the next personalized DRM code.

Optional and separate movie "rental" service for $14.99/month. Features some fancy pants dynamic DRM which allows 3 movies available for download at a time. When you're done watching you delete it and it frees up the next personalized DRM code.

What we've been hearing is that $9.99 will be for older movies, and $14.99 will be for newer ones.

You can compress DVD-sized video down to a GB or two of data. 1 gig costs Apple 50 cents or so of bandwidth. For a $10 movie, not a huge issue.

1 to 2GB is about right. Even for HD content.

Using EyeTV, I recorded a 720p episode, cut the commercials out leaving a 43 minute file. Uncompressed it's >5GB, using H.264 with multi-pass rendering it compressed down to 650 to 750MB. So a full 2 hour movie with a little more aggressive compression would weigh in at under 2GB.

So you're spot on.

On a broadband connection with 2Mbits throughput, a 2GB will download in two hours.
Hm, close to, if not exactly, realtime. Curious!

With an image with so little variation, I guess it would be too easy to remove just one watermark.

so little variation and extremely easy to duplicate using photoshop - why use watermarks at all?

Correct me if I'm wrong but at last years Special Music Event, Jobs' announced new iMacs, iPod with video and iTunes with video. So it doesn't seem to optimistic to hope for a new iPod, iTunes movie service (yes I too want DVD quality movies - in UK would be great too!), iMac Core 2 Duo. Is it too much to wish for this new Apple phone as well? This phone better be shit because I can't afford all these new Apple products.

so little variation and extremely easy to duplicate using photoshop - why use watermarks at all?

Correct me if I'm wrong but at last years Special Music Event, Jobs' announced new iMacs, iPod with video and iTunes with video. So it doesn't seem to optimistic to hope for a new iPod, iTunes movie service (yes I too want DVD quality movies - in UK would be great too!), iMac Core 2 Duo. Is it too much to wish for this new Apple phone as well? This phone better be shit because I can't afford all these new Apple products.

That is a lot to expect, but then they have a lot of existing products to update and a market that will want expect them released sooner rather than later. Unlike the Moto/IBM days the market also knows that the chips to update them have been released and what the specs of those chips are.

With faster connections such as my Covad 6.144Mbs speed, a 2 GB download takes 47 minutes. The 2 hours for a 2Mbs connection is not taking network traffic into account.

True, I'm well aware that there faster broadband connections, which would make the experience that much better. The operative word in my remark is "throughput." Perhaps I should have said "effective throughput."

Regardless, the increase in broadband rollouts in the US show that such large files are perfectly doable.